Chirply
Starts at $97 a month
Pros
- All in one platform with diverse features
- Saves a lot of money as it replaces so many tools
- Easy to use and set up various types of campaigns
- Fantastic tool for multi-channel cold outreach
Cons
- No CRM features like pipeline management
- Predictive dialer is not available
- Lack of native integrations with other third-party tools
Marketing your business has to be an omnichannel approach that connects you with your potential customers from all kinds of possible angles.
Emails are still one of the best marketing channels, but to get to that inbox is getting more and more difficult. Therefore, emails along with text messages and voice mails could significantly improve conversions of any marketing campaign.
However, to get emails, text messages, and voice mails work together seamlessly could be a huge challenge and might involve a lot of effort and money if multiple tools have to be used.
It could all get very expensive and very much beyond the budget of a small business owner.
Chirply is a great tool to solve this. It is a single tool that could be used to achieve all of the texts, emails and voicemails work perfectly together to fulfill the goals of a marketing campaign and it is way cheaper than using a separate tool for each purpose.
How good and effective is it to use? Let's find out.
UI & dashboard
Definitely one of the strong points of Chirply is it's intuitive and easy to use user interface.
It gives an excellent overview of all the phone numbers, contacts, lists, autoresponders, campaigns, etc. to have a bird's eye view of everything going on within your account.
There is a very helpful search bar for a quick search and also a lot of filtering options as well.
Voice mails
Chirply uses Twilio as a backend for all the voicemail communications and text messages. It is easily one of the best options as Twilio is a market leader in the segment with a very affordable pricing structure and worldwide availability.
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So, the first thing to do before using the tool is to connect with a Twilio number. It is pretty straight forward and easy to buy a phone number from Twilio and connect with Chirply.
All that is needed is to copy the account sender ID and live token from Twilio account and paste it in the Twilio settings in Chirply.
New mobile numbers can be bought within the Chirply dashboard easily and each number can be assigned a name for easy identification.
After purchasing the number, each number can be configured with all the necessary settings based on your campaign type and what is the objective of your campaign.
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Various auto-response messages can be set up for each number based on the keywords the tool detects when someone replies to your SMS messages.
When it comes to voice calls, almost everything from audio messages, call forwarding, voicemail messages, missed called messages and IVR's can be set up for each number separately which makes it an incredibly powerful tool for personalized marketing outreach.
Call forwarding and call whisper together work extremely well for sales teams and agencies where the agents are alerted by a whisper message on who is calling when the call is forwarded. It will give them that additional time to be prepared for the conversation.
Chirply can also send ringless voicemail drops. It is important to note that it is mandatory to have two Twilio number configured for the ringless voicemails to work, one as a filter phone number and the other as a number used to drop the actual voicemail.
Contacts & lists
As with any outreach tool, all the contacts are organized under different lists. Contacts in each list can be added manually or a contact list available as a CSV file can be easily imported.
One of the cool features of Chirply is that even if you do not have a list of contacts for outreach, there are options to generate leads within Chirply.
New leads can be generated from domains that are registered recently, Google My Business listings, Facebook business, and Yelp.
It is essential to connect to a Google API key for getting the leads from Google My Business listings. It is important to set up a maximum cap on the usage of this API to avoid high costs and to keep it under your lead generation budget. There are easy to follow step by step tutorial on how to do this.
The phone numbers in each list are color-coded depending on whether it is a mobile, landline or a VOIP number which enables a very useful filtering option.
It is also possible to send an email, text message or call any individual contact in a list separately if it is needed for any personal outreach.
Emails
There are 3 options to configure the outgoing emails for your campaigns,
- Gmail API - Probably the simplest option if you have an email address in Gsuite. Just connect the Gmail API and you are good to go.
- SMTP - If an SMPT service like SendGrid or similar is to be used, this option to be selected with all the relevant information.
- Postmark - If you have a Postmark account for transactional emails, it can be connected easily with just the API token and server token key.
SMS & Autoresponder
Autoresponse SMS messages can be built as a response for any keyword that could be used within a campaign.
The system is smart to detect relevant answers and fire up the auto-response that has already been set-up for the matching keyword.
A lot of merge tags like name, website, social media links, physical address, company name can be added to the auto-response to really personalize the conversation to increase conversions.
Support and documentation
Chat support is available within the dashboard.
There is a vast resource of video tutorials covering almost all the aspects and features of the tool with an in-depth step by step instructions.
Integrations
Additional to the native integration with Twilio for voice calls & SMS and Sendgrid for emails, Chirply also has well tested Zapier integration that makes integration with thousands of other apps easy and seamless.
However, Chirply really lacks badly when it comes to native integrations with other third-party tools. For anything other than email and text messages, you are going to be using Zapier and the available triggers.
Negatives?
Although the user interface is easy to use and intuitive, there are many instances of slow loading times within the app while selecting between different options.
I was informed that they are working with the speed improvement in future updates and releases. However, until then it is a minor con that you should be aware of.
Alternatives
Close is another omnichannel SaaS tool that has email, voice mail, and text message marketing.
Additionally, Close is a full-blown CRM and has an excellent predictive dialer built-in making it a complete sales engagement platform.
HighLevel is a CRM built exclusively for marketing agencies.
It's loaded with tons of features with a built-in funnel builder, appointment booking system, form builder, smart lists, etc.
Conclusion
So, is it good and worth the money?
I would say yes. There are very few omnichannel marketing platforms available and they all could get really expensive as most of them charge with user-based pricing. The costs could skyrocket pretty soon for a team with more than a couple of users.
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Also, Chirply really scores high in the easy to use dashboard and UI, fantastic support and tutorial videos which are very important for a tool with such a wide range of features.
Want to be a reseller channel partner for Chirply? Know more about the partnership program